CWE-393: Return of Wrong Status Code | Glexia
CWE-393 (Return of Wrong Status Code) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-393: Return of Wrong Status Code
Return of Wrong Status Code represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity,Other: Unexpected State,Alter Execution Logic: This weakness could place the system in a state that could lead unexpected logic to be executed or other unintended behaviors.
Developer Pattern
CWE-393 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-393, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-393: Return of Wrong Status Code
A function or operation returns an incorrect return value or status code that does not indicate the true result of execution, causing the product to modify its behavior based on the incorrect result.
This can lead to unpredictable behavior. If the function is used to make security-critical decisions or provide security-critical information, then the wrong status code can cause the product to assume that an action is safe or correct, even when it is not.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In the following example, an HTTP 404 status code is returned in the event of an IOException encountered in a Java servlet. A 404 code is typically meant to indicate a non-existent resource and would be somewhat misleading in this case.
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
Detection
- Fuzzing: Fuzz testing (fuzzing) is a powerful technique for generating large numbers of diverse inputs - either randomly or algorithmically - and dynamically invoking the code with those inputs. Even with random inputs, it is often capable of generating unexpected results such as crashes, memory corruption, or resource consumption. Fuzzing effectively produces repeatable test cases that clearly indicate bugs, which helps developers to diagnose the issues.
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.